On a couple of remote systems, I've been annoyed by line
wrap problems in the terminal. As in command lines would
wrap at a strange place, and then cursor movement is all
messed up, and I'd have to count (not look) when editing a
line.

Today I finally figured out what was going on: prompt
version skew!

On those particular systems, I'd at some point set my
prompt to put the hostname and cwd into title bar of the
local terminal application. I was using an invocation like
PS1='\u@\h:\w\$ \e]2;\u@\H \w\a'. To set the prompt
to username@host:cwd$ on the command line, and
something similar in the title.

But looking at the
faq this morning, I noticed it lists \[ and
\] as quoting non-printing characters. I thought
hmm...and added them around the xterm escape
sequence. Sure enough, the problems went away.

I swear this used to work, but apparently now the
terminal somehow counts the non-printing characters when
calculating line lengths, and the square bracket quoting
makes it not do that. Some kind of hack for i18n?

Most recipes suggest \033]2;<title goes
here>\007 for setting the title, but bash
supports \e for the escape character and
\a for the bell, which delimit the xterm controls.
You can also use \$ for a prompt character that
switches based on whether you're root. So a less noisy
suggestion is something like:

In other news, setting the "Delete key sends backspace"
option on the MacOS X terminial no longer seems to be
necessary for reasonable remote editing, which is nice
because it makes backspace not work at all on local apps.
fn-delete for delete-char-right (delete instead on backspace
on US keyboards in linux) still doesn't work locally
though.